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Gawd Bless’em Guv’nor and no mistake……

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Anna Raccoon on November 22, 2010

You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. I’ve tried getting angry, tried to rant – I can’t. They are like winsome toddlers taking their first steps – they fall, they tumble backwards, they try to make the right moves, and then they throw a tantrum because they just can’t get ‘it’.

‘A senior Civil Servant writes’ is becoming required reading in the Guardian, the (anonymous) diary of a man who rose to near the top of his profession and now struggles to understand the brave new world that he has been forced blinking into.

Today’s effort is epic, but worth reading for comedic value.

He knows he must master his brief, do his best to carry out the new government’s orders impartially. (That is the theory anyway.) How then to tackle Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ – the idea that people should look after themselves and their neighbours without government intervention? It’s an oxymoron for him isn’t it? How do you set out a government strategy for the government to be seen to do sod all?

He set about it in time honoured fashion. He presided over ‘an entire industry of ‘big society seminars’, ‘training courses’ (in doing nothing!) and ‘trained people to train people to do nothing’!

Big society position papers shuffled across Whitehall and all departments were asked to write narratives with details of policies that most exemplified the big society.

I bet they did. I’ll wager there were conferences and lectures in preparing staff for the transition, and posters went up advising staff of counselling courses for those affected by the new initiative of doing nothing; Union representatives to see to advise on how the change would affect ‘their people’; pension advisors to reassure that the new policy wouldn’t affect their gold plated pensioners; newsletters to write to keep staff fully informed; team confidence building week-ends to organise in salubrious hotels.

They even took on board the idea that some of them might leave the Civil Service and join in the ‘Big Society’.

But setting up your own shop is still a deeply unattractive prospect. Even to consider it, you would need a guarantee that the service will be required for some time, that the budget exists to pay for it and the confidence that you can run the service for less money. Without this, your colleagues won’t leave their jobs and pensions to join you.

Bless ‘em – they only way they can consider doing their work in the same way that everyone else does; without job security, a guaranteed pension, and the same wage – is if they are given job security, a guaranteed pension and the same wage!

Despite all this work, we have hit a brick wall. In short, the idea won’t work as not enough people will want to make it happen in the years ahead.

How can you be angry with someone who so wildly misses the point?

The point, my little petal, is that there is no longer the money to allow you to shuffle paper; we can’t afford you. You can either get out here with the rest of us and do something of value, or we will starve you out.

If we don’t have jobs and a reasonable cut out of our wages because we are committed to paying you to do nothing, then there will be no taxation to pay you. You’ve bled us dry. Gawd Bless You.

Rather than expensive training courses for the long term unemployed – with dubious results – shouldn’t we be badgering for expensive training courses for the civil servants? We could potentially save a lot more money, their wages being considerably higher than benefit payments, and they at least start from the position that they know how to get dressed in the morning, and turn up for work most days – we just need to retrain them in the art of doing something useful.

I can recall a time when there was a huge number of people doing voluntary work and involved in organising and running local interests and sports. But it was a different world. Those people are no longer there and two to three generations on their equivalents do not exist. Add to that all the complicated rules and regulations and officialdom they have to contend with why should anyone bother?

I seem to remember reading that on being appointed Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel was horrified to find that the Home Office employed 15 (?), including a night porter.Thank goodness you are back Anna. I had given up checking.

We are all aware that it is the system that is the problem. However the fools that dream up and maintain the system are difficult to get at, hidden away as they are in their ivory towers. This results in the PBI being the target of everyone’s ire – not helped of course by the fact that some of them are their own worst enemies.

Sadly one of the few known ways to get those who don’t have to live on the ground floor to listen to those of us who do is to get rid of so many of their foot soldiers that they actually start worrying for their own safety.

Don’t the people on the front line have any say in how and if they implement the rules? Much as they may not in some cases have that much choice but they are part of the system, maybe not in most cases an important part but without them implementing the wishes of the system there would be no system.Just following orders has generally been discredited as an excuse for a while now.

passat21November 23, 2010 at 09:21

If all the thousands and thousands of ex civil servants were laid out end-to-end in a line – they would be more comfortable!

obligatoNovember 23, 2010 at 08:12

Uses for ex civil servants:Ballast – for ships returning empty to China after bringing us our latest fix of tutIED detectorsSource of hot air at balloon festivalsCompanions for retired airline pilots who miss the incessant whiningReplacements for lab rats to please the animal rights jihadis ( lab staff don’t get as attached to them as they do to rats and there’s some things even rats won’t do)

How about soap and lampshades? Oh no, that was the Jews. Still, it’s just a laugh….

Gildas the MonkNovember 23, 2010 at 07:44

Hat stands. Simples!

willNovember 22, 2010 at 23:48

I’m mystified as to what these former/pro civil-service/public-sector types were taking from a self-identifying libertarian blog. Did they mistake the Passion and indignation as merely an ‘amusing writing style,’ an affectation to draw in the punters? Maybe its me that’s got it all wrong, maybe I’m wrong to stray from the warm embrace of the state, maybe I should be thanking these charitable souls for all that they’ve done for me without me even having to ask. then again maybe the miserable parasites can fuck off – humans thrived before them and I’m sure we’ll do just fine when they’re gone too.

PericlesNovember 22, 2010 at 19:42

Lovely, Clarissa : the Mine Inaction Group !

It is a shame, however, and often quite unfair that thirty years of Labour misrule — nearly half the period since the War — have given rise to an atmosphere in which civil servants, once seen as perhaps stuffy but at least dedicated to the public good (however little their understanding thereof), have come to be seen as parasites.

More seriously though I don’t think all of the blame for the state of the civil service can be laid at the door the the Labour party. Yes, last time they radically expanded the size of it simply to keep the jobless total down but successive governments have made more petty rules, gradually politicised it and/or bypassed it with special advisers. Somewhere along the way the image of the stuffed suit has been replaced with what seems to be an altogether more accurate image of a power crazed small man with dodgy facial hair.

Culling the size of the state will – one hopes in a moment of utter naivety – makes them realises that the dog wags the tail, rather than the tail wagging the dog.

ivanNovember 22, 2010 at 23:30

Clarissa, the only way any reduction will be made is to cut the top 66% and discard them, and their gold plated pensions.

The same could be said for the NHS – remove the top several layers of management – not those that do the work.

MRBNovember 23, 2010 at 10:13

It is peoples mindset and expection of their totally unrealistic pension that worries me, it is sucking the sap out of this country and then we’ll all wake up and wonder where the trees have gone?

stating the bleedin’ obviousNovember 23, 2010 at 21:32

If the pension’s so good why didn’t you join the civil service?

BobNovember 23, 2010 at 22:03

I take it that you mean the top 66% of each civil servant- what are we going to do with all the spare legs?

JimSNovember 22, 2010 at 18:22

Once upon a time the civil service designed its own buildings, managed and maintained them. It provided meals for its staff, it trained its own staff and managed their pensions when they retired.

Now the civil service leases its buildings under a financial fiddle called PFI that moves the costs from the capital to the current budget. The contractor borrows money at commercial rates and loads its profit on top and at the end of twenty years walks away with its loans and shareholders paid off and a spare building on its hands. The buildings are, of course, managed and maintained by the private sector. Catering, training and pensions services likewise are all contracted out.

Back-office services in the MOD which were once recorded on the books as administrative costs carried out by the civil service are now with the private sector but charged against the equipment or front-line budget.

Public = bad, private = good is far too simplistic. Can we really run an economy based on telephone sanitizers and hairdressers?